(2025-04-20) Sloan The Golden Sardine

Robin Sloan: The Golden Sardine. Last week, I went into the city—North Beach—for a reading of longshoremen poetry, part of Alexis Madrigal’s book tour. The venue was the Golden Sardine, a bar relatively young but somehow instantly iconic; it seems as if it’s been there as long as City Lights, across the street.

I’ve sensed a thaw lately in the cosmos of letters: an energy, an urgency. Maybe it’s because people fear this might be the last good season before the end of the world, so we’d better get it all out now. Maybe it’s just because it’s spring.

Then he read a few poems, &, magically, invited audience members to join the fun. Folks scootched up to the mic, clutching printouts of poems totally new to them, & they delivered. Killed.

The poetry was excellent—what an era, what a scene—& the vibe was immaculate. Alexis held court with generosity & erudition; no one knows more about the bay than him (the whole of it, in time & space) & if they do, they can’t charm a room like him. Alexis for mayor, basically. Too bad he’s already got a better job.

My stock of zines sold out in a day, which wasn’t my intention.
Gradually, I’ll figure out the level of demand here, & print accordingly.

This shop represents a new “line of business” for me—not as substantial as the novels or the olive oil, but still very serious. (I explained my motivation in the previous edition.)

I do however have a few links of my own to share here at the top.

, an addition to the Moonbound mini-site: a fresh note on influence, focused on Hayao Miyazaki … but not the Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli, exactly. This one is about the master at work, alone.
As a reminder, my intention with the mini-site is to build, over time, a durable companion to the novel—a kind of digital appendix.

Nearly all of my streaming time in 2024 was devoted to a complete rewatch of Star Trek: Voyager. I saw a scattering of episodes during the show’s initial run, 1995-2001, then watched the whole series for the first time in 2020-2021. Now, it’s part of my household canon—we’ll be happily rewatching every five years or so until we’re dead.

If your profile is similar to mine in 2020—i.e. you’re familiar with the series but haven’t seen most of it—I will suggest that a complete viewing is a great idea. Here are a few reasons:

Kathryn Janeway is the finest Star Trek captain; Kate Mulgrew makes her leadership balanced & irrefutable.

As a writer, I find TV from this era energizing, not because every line of dialogue is dazzling, or because every episode is great, but because these people were trying to tell complete stories.

You can find plenty of Voyager viewing guides online, detailing which episodes to watch, which to skip. My guide is simple: just watch them all! Even the dull & dorky episodes are an improvement on most of the modern alternatives; even the dullest & dorkiest ones glitter with optimism & curiosity

The Book by Keith Houston is grade-A Robin bait, & it is perhaps for that reason that I didn’t read it immediately upon publication in 2016. Maybe I felt personally targeted? Turns out, it’s wonderful, full of fascinating details. Keith’s focus is sharply on the book as object—the materiality of the thing.

And, guess what: the paperback arrives later this month! This is one to read in print—The Book refers to itself, “explains itself”, in a delicious way.

Needless to say, it pairs well with Roland Allen’s The Notebook, discussed previously. I read them back to back & now I am overflowing with Book Feeling.)

Abundance by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson is newly-published, already much-discussed. I’m a longtime reader & fan of both authors; Ezra’s writing & thinking in particular has been a big influence on me & Moonbound

His development of a muscular, productive “liberalism that builds” is one of a few key strands that came together to form my vision of the Anth: an actually-successful human civilization; a system of global cooperation & coordination that could get things done.

What are the other strands? Alongside Ezra, there’s some of the Culture of Iain M. Banks; some of the competence of the modern Federal Reserve; some of the success of the Mondragon cooperatives; & this one newsletter from Deb Chachra.

I am a wild-eyed fan of Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea. His latest, Where the Axe Is Buried, was just published by MCD. I’m very proud to have Ray as a labelmate, & I can’t wait to dig in.

A few days ago I watched a freight train pass, one of the really long ones, many of its cars bearing the telltale blister of a refrigeration unit, & it made me think again of Nicola Twilley’s Frostbite, the book that explains the history & structure of the cold chain: the global system of refrigeration which makes the whole grocery store possible. Nicky does this with a great spelunking spirit—Frostbite reads more like an adventure than an explainer.

The cold chain gets my vote for the layer of infrastructure most central to modern life. There’s stiff competition for that position—the internet! the power grid!—but really, take away the refrigerators, & we are living in a whole different world.

Here’s how a small importer is thinking about this new world. Lisa Cheng Smith is the founder of Yun Hai, the fabulous online shop that imports my favorite soy sauce.

In her itemization of what comes next, I liked this note … 
Divesting from tech and advertising platforms as much as possible

Our customers already give us everything we need when they sign up for this newsletter and express interest in our store—we just need to dialogue with you all. Even outside of threatened tariffs, I’m ready to move in this direction. It better reflects my values.

Here’s a note on tariffs & monetary policy from Neel Kashkari, president of the Minneapolis Fed, who is a top-ten technocrat. If your government was all Neel Kashkaris, you’d be set.

if I was Europe, & I was feeling feisty, I’d imagine some new kind of “digital tariff” & slap it on all the big tech platforms.

The odd & antique thing about tariffs is that they only apply to physical goods, even as more & more of the economy has become intangible. For the U.S., this is very convenient. What do we export? Software, light as air.

How do you collect a tariff on a digital service? Who pays? I have no idea! Sounds like a VERY fun assignment for some wonks in Brussels.

Here is Jasmine Sun on AGI:
Finally, I conclude that AGI is more a worldview than technology—nobody knows when we’ll get there, or where “there” is—and we may be better off focusing on the AIs we build along the way.

AI discovered wholly new proteins before it could count the ‘r’s in ‘strawberry’, which makes it neither vaporware nor a demigod but a secret third thing.

In a recent edition of her increasingly indispensable newsletter on design, tech, & creative work, Carly Ayres writes … 
If March taught us anything, it’s that cultural velocity is outpacing our ability to process it. We’re not iterating—we’re accelerating. No brakes.

… & I think I have to disagree. Isn’t it precisely the opposite? A certain strand of technology might be accelerating, but culture is going nowhere in particular—a decaying orbit around a decades-old gravity well

Carly’s canny documentation of a recent wave of AI-generated images in the style of Studio Ghibli makes this case succinctly. Technical prowess meets cultural stasis.

Here is W. David Marx on the age of the double sellout.

Here is Navneet Alang, reminding us what a graceful writer he is, reflecting on some lingering lessons of the pandemic.

Anth vibes:
Ongoing declines in solar PV module costs are the single most extreme value generation opportunity that has ever occurred to humans, and business models that exploit this steady progression need to find some way to get the unit economics the right way up at the beginning. It turns out that capital has a finite appetite for billion dollar experiments

A report from the city of the robo-taxi: Waymo continues to be really great. This is a difficult thing to get right, & they have gotten it: exactly right. I mean, talk about a lot of moving parts. Impressive as hell.

I’ve been making my way slowly but happily through the John Maynard Keynes biography I mentioned a while ago. His mind was just BIG in so many ways—generous & energetic. Jupiterian.

I’d like to make the case that Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is one of the three or four journalists most perfectly suited to this precise moment.
Her eye is just so good: locked onto the seams of the global system, pursuing deep questions of who gets to be a citizen of where, & why; of what citizenship even means (or will mean) in the 21st century.
Fascism is, in my estimation, a direct linear function of us vs. them.
The cosmopolitan view is its ultimate antidote, as it asks, with ice-cold innocence: us who? Them who?

I loved Joel Dueck’s recent newsletter about “a certain category of literature which has no name”: the web-native work posted on a rudimentary HTML page now crumbling before our eyes.

Here’s a four-panel comic from Marc Weidenbaum & Hannes Pasqualini. Here’s another one. I love these! What a cool new stream of work.

Here is a meaty essay from a synth plugin designer about THE VERY CONCEPT OF THE PRESET!

Charlotte Shane:
I think jailbreaking from the middle distance is transformative and liberatory, and I don’t think it happens automatically by putting your phone away. I think you have to make a conscious, curious effort and find the right teachers. The tools that worked best for me were history and religion, which are of course tightly entwined

I’d like to cross-reference this notion with my own warning about orthographic media. It also rhymes with temporal bandwidth, Alan Jacobs’s memorable invocation of Thomas Pynchon, who wrote:
“Temporal bandwidth” is the width of your present, your now … The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago.

What are we doing with all these links, anyway? We’re weaving the web tighter. Making introductions. Maintaining provenance. It’s meaningful, especially now, as AI systems work in the opposite direction: denaturing the links, melting down the chains of connection. (curation)

Or maybe, like Alan Jacobs, we are building & maintaining an alternative culture, for the “fraction of one percent of us will be willing & able to choose something other & better.”

I appreciated this post of Alan’s, in which he expresses weariness at the endless diagnosis & re-diagnosis of the toxic problem of the internet &, especially, the internet-connected phone. Here is his assessment:
I believe we keep on re-diagnosing, and describing the same diagnosis in slightly different terms, because we don’t know what to do.